Disconnecting at the same time every hour

Since I first started the game a month ago, I've been disconnecting nonstop. Every hour I play. It finally got annoying enough for me to dig deeper into things to try to figure out what is wrong.

Let me just say before I go any further that this is not an issue related to ping or level3 or any of that. If you tell me to do a traceroute, I will hurt you.

The connection drops are pretty stable. Here's a timeline so far today:
20:17:29
21:14:27
23:18:21
00:19:46
01:21:44

They all happen at 1 hour intervals, +/- 5 minutes. There is a one hour gap that is very odd, and I cannot explain it. For a second I thought I had fixed the issue, but when the next hour rolled around, I got disconnected again.


First I checked my routers logs to see if it was a DHCP issue. I saw a release around the time that the client disconnected. Set a static IP, still happens. Next I thought maybe the client was keeping a connection open and idle, and my router was killing off that connection after an hour. So I bumped the idle connection limit to 4 hours. Still happens.

Then I fired up wireshark to monitor things. I see two connections. One used for the game, and one that I believe is a ping/keep alive connection, as I see a packet in both directions once every 10 seconds. The interesting thing about this is that the *client* is the one that closes the connection, not the server or router.

The client sends a FIN,ACK to the main game server, then to the ping/idle server, then the servers respond with their own FIN,ACK and the connection is done. It is my understanding that if the server, router, or ISP closed the connection, it would send the FIN,ACK to the client, or the client would send data and get nothing in return (and wouldn't get a return to the FIN,ACK it's sending). I really want to attach a debugger and set a breakpoint on the close socket winapi function, then step up the stacj to see what is causing the disconnect, but I fear that would get me in trouble :/.

Ultimately I am at a loss. Something in the game or my computer is causing the client to disconnect almost exactly every hour. I can't keep playing like this, I have to figure the problem out or I will just have to quit. Pls help :/.

I've figured it out. This is a problem that would affect maybe 0.00001% of users, lol. If you find this from Google and are running FFXIV in a virtual machine, the problem is most likely time drift. Every hour the Windows kernel compares the system time to the source (RTC, PIT, HPET) and if they are out of sync it corrects the system time. For me this meant jumping ahead 3-4 minutes every hour. You can see this in Event Viewer under System.

The solution is to fix the time drift so that the system clock never gets out of sync. I eventually discovered that in qemu, disabling HPET fixed it (adding -no-hpet to the command line). If you use anything else, good luck :).